Coordinated Systems, a technology company, has been in business since 1972. What’s your perception of the previous decade in business?
I always come back to the same thinking with each new economic encounter: things can’t get any more convoluted than the previous calamity or economic downturn we have ever come up against before. Yet sure seem to find a way of proving me wrong. But I also have realized that no matter how bad things seem at any given time, and it may take awhile for it to come to realization, but there always seem to be numerous positive side effects that rise out of most declines. We consider this ‘Great Recession’ the U.S. is going through to be one of the toughest we ever experienced and many businesses will fail the test.
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How do businesses survive those hardships?
Most companies that are weak more often than not fail during these times. Yet like everything in life, for those businesses that survive, there is a lot that can be learned from all the experience. You have to monitor every aspect of the business and be aware of the symptoms of that trouble before they become major problems. In addition it becomes important to not deny problems going on outside the company and understand and analyze how they may affect your business. You need to also make the hard decisions necessary to stop wasteful and unnecessary expenditures.
What are some of the ways these hardships can have a positive impact?
By staying on top of things comes the satisfaction of successfully dealing with difficulty and gaining the knowledge and skills that make us stronger to deal with the next problem. And on it goes preparing you for the turn of events to boom times again and giving you the gift of reliving the experience at later dates as they are reminisced as ‘the good old days,’ rehashing what it took to overcome the hardest obstacles thrown at us.
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How has your company fared during this current recession?
We at CSI are grateful for our experience of prior difficult times. It has humbled and tempered us and paid off handsomely in our success and we know that learning is the silver lining to this storm as well. Today, after going through numerous recessions, we consider ourselves to be seasoned veterans to these economic times and pride ourselves as survivors. We’ve learned a lot over the years from our business history. We’ve enjoyed many boom times as well — but when times were booming we always had in the back of our minds the tough times and it kept us centered which gave us the advantage to be prepared. Because of that preparation, we’ve just completed what I would say is our best year in business, adding a number of key accounts and new partners.
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What are some of the things you prepare for, day-to-day in operating your business?
We’ve always had a deep respect for debt. We always looked at debt as more of an obstacle to our goals and borrowed only when we could envision a payback with interest to ourselves through business enhancement or growth. We were debt free when we entered this recession and today CSI is still debt free and has been throughout this recession. This is an advantage to our customers as well in the knowing that we are a standalone company that can carry itself financially when times are tough.
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Can you describe how you’ve gone about dealing with managing a staff through difficult times?
We’ve gone through prior recessions before and prided ourselves on keeping our company intact throughout those times. We’ve enjoyed tremendous loyalty from our staff and have returned that loyalty by securing their jobs through a no layoff policy even when things got tough. Many of our employees have been with us for decades. By being loyal to our employees it has the added benefit of giving us a knowledge base of employees that have evolved with our product lines. This means they know the product cold. This knowledge includes all versions of the product from the beginning and not just the current version being sold today. And we all know how valuable that is when a client needs customer service.
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How have you developed your business model to thrive despite a difficult economy?
When we were in the throes of a downturn, we realized how important our customer base was to us and we made a concerted effort to enhance our approach to how we offered and carried out support by changing the industry policies that seemed to be the standard. We shook it up completely by giving a valuable service to our customers at a realistic price. We knew our customers were experiencing the same issues we were having and we made it a mission to revamp our policies. We did it in a downturn and it worked, so we knew it was successful. We continued the same policy when the economy got better and it still receives kudos from our clients.
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